Crowd-sourcing help, please

I was going to check the data in this poster myself, but I just haven’t had a minute to do it. It was posted on a liberal friend’s Facebook page. I’m pretty sure that it’s a case of “lies, damn lies, and statistics,” but I have only instinct, not data. Do any of you have better information?

Share this:

Might as well call the entire thing a lie and start from scratch. It would do just as well. Never allow the enemy to choose their place of battle.

Eidolon

I’m a bit confused about the timeline here. When it says GDP growth, for example, what are we talking about? Yearly? Quarterly? Monthly? It’s easy to pick a particularly good data point and a particularly bad data point, especially if you’re talking about a short timeline, and say “look, this one is better than that one.” Over the course of 5 years, of course there’s going to be at least one month or quarter that’s pretty okay, and there were several bad spots to choose from between the end of Bush’s time and the beginning of Obama’s.

Also, the deficit GDP thing, I don’t know what that means. One trick people like to use is to use the stimulus as a baseline and then say “see, we haven’t increased that much” — over a supposedly one-time amount of stimulus money, rather than the actual normal budget for that year, i.e. we’re actually spending more than the emergency let’s-dump-tons-of-money-into-the-economy budget of 2009, but the rate of increase doesn’t seem that big since we haven’t increased much from there.

There are hundreds of these sorts of things being posted and shared on FB, and there are a much smaller number of useful posts being circulated from our side. (On my FB page this morning, there was a quote from Hillary Clinton complaining about how she & Bill had struggled financially, with the legend “Share of You Think Hillary is an Idiot.” Yeah, that’ll work in convincing marginally pro-Hillary people to change their views.

There needs to be some entity…don’t know if it should be a nonprofit, a for-profit, or just an informal network…dedicated to generating useful FB memes and counteracting malign and false ones.

Danny Lemieux

I can’t take these numbers on all at once, so perhaps one at a time over the course of the day.
re. the DJIA…Bush’s term began in a trough (the Clinton-era dot.com collapse) and ended in a trough (the Democrat-inspired housing collapse). What they are measuring now is the DJIA’s growth from the 2008-2009 trough to a DJIA that is currently at a peak, albeit one that reflects the easy-money policies of the Fed, rather than healthy business activity. We still have 2-1/2 years to go.

Re. employment. Let the Liberals believe what they want, but most people living in reality land look around them and see people (especially young people) struggling with part-time jobs, low-skill and underpaid jobs or just not participating in the workforce altogether. The average unemployment rate under the Obama administration is 7.6%, as compared to 5.3% under Bush. http://www.factcheck.org/2014/01/obamas-numbers-january-2014-update/

Wolf Howling

A couple more years of all this success and our nation will be bankrupt.
Certainly the DOW number is correct. But the problem is that the only thing keeping our economy from tanking for all of the past five years is the easy money policy of the fed. The stock market is booming because of it. It itself is a huge bubble. It gives a grossly false impression of the strength of our economy. The only wealth being created is . . . among the very wealthy. Just like so much of everything the Dems talk about – particularly the populist war on the 1%, the reality is that their policies help the rich and kill the middle class.

As to unemployment, sure the number looks better. When you drop millions of people out of the workforce so that you don’t have to count them anymore, it most assuredly would. The real number, if we still had the same labor participation rate, would be closer to 10%. If the Obama employment numbers get much better, it will mean we’re all unemployed.

The GDP number is also horse manure. The Obama Administration changed how GDP is calculated just before the last election, so that we now count a great deal of illusory wealth.

MorowbieJukes

Except for the DOW, inflated by the easy money policy of the Fed, the rest of the numbers are fraudulent. 4.1% growth? One must be very stupid or liberal to believe that. First quarter growth was negative and greatly understated at that. Fourth quarter 2013 growth was close to zero and probably negative as well.

@WolfHowling and @MorowbieJukes brought up the point I thought of–the participation rate for employment has dropped precipitously. Older unemployed retired, whether they wanted to or not; others went out on disability; others returned to “higher education.”

I’m also interested in when the data points were taken. From Bush’s last day in office to today? What if we compared the same time period: Year 5 of Bush vs. Year 5 of Obama. Would Obama’s stats be so rosy?

DL Sly

Given that those who have given up looking for work completely are no longer counted in the published unemployment rate, it isn’t just “instinct” that tells us these numbers are cooked.

SADIE

I am mathematically challenged. My judgments are always based on my own personal reality. What’s the cost of apples, fish or meat? How much does it cost to fill the tank ($1.60/gallon in 2008). Percentage/increase for health insurance (increased 40% since 2008). COLA is a joke, since the feds removed the cost of reality over the years.
Cherry picking stats still leaves a lot of rotten ones still in the fruit bin.

Downloaded this at the time it happened. When it became clear that Obama was the nominee, and then when elected is when the “fit hit the shan”. Clear to see for those who have eyes, which means the libs are blind to it.

Caped Crusader

This is a clear vote of no confidence from those who must project into the future. If investors felt that good times were ahead, and Obama was good for the economy the stock market would have had a sustained rally in anticipation of good times ahead.

SADIE

One look at the chart and I thought …”the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

To DemProgs (to use Ms. Book’s term), facts don’t matter. They will march in lockstep with Obama and Hillary. Obama and Hillary could say the sky is green and the grass is blue and DemProgs would believe them and do government-funded research to prove it.

My sister — a DemProg — posted a FB pic of a group of African-American men carrying high-powered machine gun-looking weapons. They looked like gangsters. Her comment somehow suggested that open-carry proponents would feel uncomfortable with this sort of people openly carrying weapons, so why should others carry openly?

If she hadn’t been my sister, I would have accused her of racism and racial profiling. How dare she suggest that African-Americans who LOOK a certain way (gangster style) necessarily be law breakers! How dare she suggest Conservatives would be bothered by gun-carrying people who LOOK a certain way! Maybe they would; maybe they wouldn’t.
My sister’s line of argument cannot be argued with — not because it has an air-tight defense. No! It is because there is no clear logic to it. Who cares how someone looks? How does someone act? Are they abiding by the law?

But she and other Libs can use their emotional blather to get their way. They’ve drunk the KoolAid. They’ll need a Damascus Road experience like St. Paul’s before they see anything but their Lefty gods.

As far as I can recall, St. Paul had a Jesus encounter on the road to Damascus This is interesting to dissect because his original name was Saul, someone who fought Christians. Thus this is more accurately a Leftist zealot or cannonfodder fanatic.

And it is indeed true that the primary reason why the LEft refuses to believe, is because they have a religion they already believe in. It is not because they are atheists. They are not atheists at all, any more than they are “pacifists”.

JohnC

None of those number a thing.
Not as long as the following are true-

When President Barack Obama was inaugurated on January 20, 2009, the National Debt was: $10,626,877,048,913.08

The National Debt as I type this is $17,551,408,985,062.12.

JohnC

mean a thing, sorry

Matt_SE

As several have already posted, these numbers are crap.

– Dow is a “real” number in the same way that it was right before the dot-com or housing bubbles burst. Dow is being inflated by QE. One way to be sure: if the economy or Dow were working normally, would the market go higher or lower due to unequivocally bad news? Things are operating the exact opposite of how they should. Also, 90% of stocks are owned by the richest 10% of people, if you care about the income inequality thing. So it’s not like the middle class or poor are benefiting from this.

-By “unemployment,” they mean U3. This is a phony measure. The better measure is U6, which was around 8% in 2008, peaked at over 16% in 2010, and is currently 12%. If there were a real recovery, wouldn’t U6 come down as well? Yes, it would.

-GDP growth is fraudulent. The true annualized GDP for 2013 was 1.9%, as published by the bureau of economic analysis. The first quarter of 2014 has seen its second print (i.e. first revision) and came in at -1.0%. The 4.1% number was pulled out of someone’s *ss.

-I don’t even know what “Deficit GDP” is…and I’m fairly well-read on economics. I don’t know of anyone who uses this measure regularly.

-Consumer confidence is another cherry-picked number. Consumer confidence, when? What year? What month? These things come out regularly, and without context, they are meaningless.

Matt_SE

Note: the 4.1% number came from one quarter (the best one, naturally) in 2013: Q3. As I stated, the averaged, real number for the whole year AS PUBLISHED BY THE GOVERNMENT was 1.9%.

I suppose it’s going to come as a great shock to this person when the U.S. goes into recession in Q2 of this year. After all, weren’t we growing?!?

Any number that you weren’t part of collecting and deriving, is cooked. And yes, that means 99% of em.

Mike Devx

As John C noted at 4:07 above, Our government has spent 7 trillion borrowed dollars over Obama’s five years that it never has any intention of paying back. That buys a lot of fake prosperity.
What’s 7 trillion divided by 400 million Americans? $17,500. PER AMERICAN.

I’m glad we’re fisking each of those statistics. You can ask some valid questions even about an irrefutable number such as the stock market. For example: Many of us are contributing pre-tax dollars to our 401Ks for a variety of reasons. Where else would you put that money under the same conditions? Remove all that constant cash infusion from the stock market, and how well would it be doing?

You can cherry pick statistics and warp them all you want. If that’s the picture of how this country is doing… well, we all know how the country is REALLY doing. Most people are not fooled by this silly distortion crap. Most Russians weren’t fooled by the silly (and hilarious) Pravda glowing crap either. Our New American Pravda providers will fare no better.

I put efforts like this right up there with the “It’s A Recovery Summer!” campaign by the Democrats of 2010. We know how that one turned out. I applaud them for this effort, and I want them to continue it with every ounce of effort in their tiny little hearts. Pleae, by all means, keep going! Here’ let me hand you a better shovel, and keep on digging!

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